Plant identification

Cardcaptor Sakura is back. The first episode of the new series spent most of its time reintroducing the characters from the original, and I can’t say just how triumphant this return is likely to be until I see more.

There is a lot of floral imagery. Cherry blossoms, above, are inevitable in the first episode of any school anime. Others seem more arbitrarily selected, and are sometimes hard to identify.

I think those are gazanias framing the characters, or maybe Chrysanthemum carinatum.

Gerbera? Pyrethrum? Or something else?

At first glance, those look like roses. However, I’ve never seen roses that blue, and the leaves are wrong. Either the artist took too many liberties, or they’re something else.

Perhaps those are highly stylized polemoniums, but that’s just a guess.

I have no idea what those are supposed to be, and I wouldn’t trust anything Yamazaki says about them.

Aya Hisakawa is Kero-chan again, so there’s that to look forward to, even if the botany is a bit muddled.

I sampled a few other new series. The first episode of Laid-Back Camp featured a quietly competent girl, experienced in camping and comfortable being alone. (Her hairstyle suggests that she might be a future Florence King.) Unfortunately, there was another girl, and it looks like the series is going to be another damned high school club story. Wonderduck also found the first episode noteworthy.

Katana Maidens ~ Toji No Miko is girls with swords. There’s magic and monsters and political intrigue, and the principal character smiles too much. I might watch more, or I might not.

The above image is from the opening to Pop Team Epic. It has nothing to do with the rest of the show. The image below is more representative. If you thought Teekyu was over-intellectualized and excessively subtle, you might enjoy PTE. It’s a pity that the jokes aren’t funny.

I read some of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki manga. Some of it was creepy; some of it was ridiculous, and probably not intentionally so. Junji Ito Collection animates some of his stories. The first episode featured one of his “humorous” stories. I don’t share Ito’s sense of humor. I may give it another try, but I don’t have much appetite for horror.

Working Buddies is a series of shorts about a pair of cats trying various jobs, presumably intended for children. It’s rather dull, noteworthy mainly for the annoying pseudo-animation (the outlines of the characters are constantly mechanically distorted when they are otherwise motionless), but furries might appreciate some of the sentiments.

If none of these turns out to be worth watching, there’s Made in Abyss, which I can at last watch without paying Amazon.com twice.